Unofficial news and tips about Google

February 13, 2007

Gmail Opens to Anyone on Valentine's Day

If you don't live in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and Japan (Gmail is already open there), go to gmail.com and see if you can create a new account.

"In keeping with our tradition of Gmail holiday announcements -- Gmail was launched on April Fool's Day -- we're inviting everyone worldwide to share the love this Valentine's Day. Good relationships require good communication, after all, and we think Gmail is a great tool for staying in touch," said a Google spokesman.

Another interesting news is that Google will offer a paid Gmail service that will have bigger space quotas. "[Sergey] Brin said the company will start selling additional storage capacity to e-mail users with extraordinary needs. Google still hasn't figured out the specifics, but Brin indicated the e-mail storage and fees to be introduced later this year would be similar to Google's photo-hosting service that charges $25 annually for 6.25 gigabytes and $500 annually for 250 gigabytes."

Even though Gmail has around 60 million users (according to a comScore study from December 2006), much less than Hotmail (236 mil.) and Yahoo Mail (249 mil.), Google says it's not important to be the market leader. "We have already made e-mail better for everyone in the world", said Gmail's product manager, Keith Coleman, referring to the fact that other email services had to offer bigger storages and more features, after Gmail's surprising launch.

Gmail is important for Google, because it's an opening door for many of its services: Google Talk (integrated as Gmail Chat), Google Calendar (you can send and receive event invitations), Google Docs (open attachments), as well as a way to share a contact list with other Google services and a way to keep users logged in. It will be interesting to see if Gmail grows naturally or the company will start to offer by default a Gmail account when you create a Google account.

But if Google charges users who needs extra storage a subscription fee, it is obviously against their mission of 'don't delete anything'. I don't think Google would like their users start deleting email.

The reason I like Gmail so much is because there is very little spam, like another user commented, this will open the door to spammers and what not, though I hope it doesn't start increasing spam within the Gmail accounts

i think g-mail sucks, it is slow, freezes up all the time, loses e-mails, has hateful string format and is hard to find and sort mail be categories. it is the worst e-mail i have ever experienced, compared to aol, hotmail, yahoo, etc. i'd gladly pay for a service that cut out spam, and junk adverts and their system of screening my mail for key words to plug adverts in often makes my shorter messages take longer to send as it can't figure out what to plug in... so, no, on the whole, g-mail is so bad, i'm doing anything i can to get away from them, after 1 yr, on 6 accounts, they consistently stink!

even to post this, it took 3 tries due to their software mis-processing... i have tried to call them and write them and get nothing but bad answers if any at all, i think they got too big, too fast and no longer care or can support their clients...i don't buy into the hype... i have used 2 different macs and 3 pc's over this period and they all have the same problem, and all fro various locations and connections around the world,google search is great, their mail is horrible.